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West prepares for return of killer virus
DELTA, Colo. (AP)--Bouncing along in his truck, Keith Lucy turns down a rain-slickened dirt road and drives past several modest homes on the outskirts of this western Colorado town.
He stops next to a cattail marsh, where weathered, broken-down corrals and rusting farm equipment speak of better days. The environmental health officer for Delta County climbs out to peer at the marsh water, which is still, soupy and glistening with liquefied organic matter.
Perfect. No mosquito larvae. Yet.
But the insects are shaking off the winter cold in Colorado and other parts of the West. With them comes another season of the West Nile virus, a mosquito-borne killer that has infected thousands of people since the first domestic case turned up in New York in 1999.
For two-thirds of the country, the crisis has largely passed as the virus sweeps westward. But battle plans are being drawn up by health officials from the apple orchards of western Colorado to the California coast, all of them hoping to lessen the blow from a virus that has no cure.
Heading into this season, the virus is blamed for 564 U.S. deaths over the past five years. Incredibly, 546 of those deaths--97 percent--have come in the last two years.
Carried afar by birds bitten by infected mosquitos, the virus hasn't yet hit the West hard, except in Colorado. But few states are waiting.
Wyoming has earmarked $1.7 million for mosquito-control programs, up sharply from $387,000 last year. In Arizona, officials have doubled the budget for surveillance and testing.
In California, the most populous state, mosquito districts have begun work earlier than usual in expanded areas of the state. Sentinel flocks of chickens were tested through the winter, and the virus was found for the first time in Ventura County earlier this year.
On the western slopes of the Rockies, where orchards hug the river bottoms and cattle ranches are nestled against pastel mesas, there is fear that Colorado could again be ground zero after leading the nation with 2,947 of 9,858 overall cases last year--and 61 of 262 deaths.
Experts say the virus tends to be at its worst in its second year in a region. That could mean a long, deadly summer in places like Delta County, where scare resources are being stretched thin to battle the bugs.
The marsh, Lucy and mosquito control officer Jim Terrazas are looking at is directly behind a park popular with the locals for picnics and fishing.
"This is classic," Lucy said of the proximity of prime mosquito breeding ground to people.
Half the marsh is owned by a Denver man who doesn't want mosquito control officers on his land. The rest is owned by a local who has given his consent for the use of larvicide, which kills soon-to-be mosquitos.
That leaves Terrazas with a quandary. What good does it do to treat half the torpid water and not the other?
"It's a waste of taxpayer money," he said.
The difficulty of stopping the disease is hard to overstate. The tiniest amount of standing water can be breeding territory for a mosquito--sagging gutters, sewers and bird baths, abandoned tires, even an upturned bottle cap.
Lucy moves on to the Escalante State Wildlife Area along the Gunnison River, where there is plenty of stagnant water from irrigation runoff in ditches and bottomland depressions. Refuge officials would like to flood the banks of the river to help pike and chub, two endangered species of fish.
"Pike and chub need flooded grasslands," wildlife area manager Mike Zeman explains. "The fish have a short time to swim into backwaters and spawn. When the water recedes they get back into the river."
Zeman won't allow adulticide--a pesticide designed to kill adult mosquitoes that is often spread through machine-generated fog clouds--on the 7,500-acre refuge.
"Fogging is nonselective," he said. "You're hitting all kinds of insects and we have all kinds of birds who feed on those insects."
Lucy looks a little stunned, and a little concerned.
"Their primary focus is on wildlife habitat, but mosquitoes breed here and they don't stay here," Lucy said.
The Meecham Building is a dilapidated warehouse near downtown Grand Junction, the biggest city in western Colorado and just 50 miles northwest of Delta. Dim light illuminates a jumble of chairs, file cabinets, shelving and other flotsam.
"This is the war room, I guess," said Steve DeFeyter, director of environmental health for the Mesa County Health Department.
The room holds more than 10 tons of larviciding agents, poison meant to kill baby mosquitos. The county spent a little more than $102,000 on larviciding agents this year. The total budget for mosquito control is pegged at about $160,000, four times the amount spent last year.
The battle will be joined on many fronts, including the catch basins below more than 3,000 city storm drains--a favorite egg-laying site for the culex tarsalis mosquito, a primary transmitter of the virus.
City crews will soon begin dropping cork-shaped larvicide "briquettes" through storm grates. They'll have to revisit the drains every month through October.
Crews of backpack sprayer-wearing college students will fan out to spread larvicide in city detention ponds, DeFeyter said. They'll also hit practice fields and parks where watering leaves pools of water, golf course ponds, and pastures and farmland.
"You try to target the major spots, the hot spots," DeFeyter said. "It comes down to a numbers game."
DeFeyter figures the United States was ripe for this type of viral outbreak. Scientists are unsure how the West Nile virus made the jump from Africa and the Middle East to New York, but it's no mystery how it spread from there.
"The bottom line is that these birds migrate, mix and fly back north in the spring," DeFeyter said. "As they do that eventually it works its way West. The birds follow the natural migratory pathways, which in the West are river corridors.
"Of course, people live along these rivers and there are mosquitoes along these irrigated river bottoms," he said.
Mesa County Health Department spokeswoman Kristy Westerman puts it this way: "It's kind of like a tidal wave."
By attacking larvae with primarily organic poisons, health officials are trying to avoid having to kill adult mosquitoes, which can mean fogging and aerial spraying with Malathion, a toxic chemical known to cause illness and genetic mutations.
Last year, residents in nearby Paonia protested a plan to spray the chemical because of health concerns. Someone bombed a warehouse where Malathion was being stored. The bomber was never identified and no one was hurt, but health officials took note.
"It was a not-so-subtle message that this is not the way you want to control mosquitos here," Lucy said. "If you're on the no-spray, no-pesticide side, you're not going to allow Malathion to be used. That's the dilemma we're in."
Lucy and his colleagues are also waging their battle on a budget of just $25,000.
"You get as much public health as you want to buy," said Bonnie Koehler, the deputy director of the Delta County health department. "If you want to give me a hundred thousand dollars, I can give you the George Lucas mosquito control plan the likes of which you have never seen."
The public is being enlisted in the war against larvae, encouraged in a statewide campaign--"Fight the Bite"--to remove standing water wherever they find it and to treat water in ornamental ponds, fountains and livestock water tanks with larvicide.
Still, DeFeyter will begin trapping mosquitoes and sampling catch basins in Grand Junction for larvae next month to determine how well the war is going. He has also laid the groundwork for an adulticide campaign, if necessary.
"Nobody wants to get into that because it raises such controversy," DeFeyter said. "But if it gets to a public health emergency, then it's the only option you have left to protect the public health."
Date: 4/28/04
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